Taomeow

It is a belief system for the indoctrinated, but for the indoctrinators it is primarily (and often entirely) a power grab system. All our "life sciences" inherited the tradition they directly arose from -- that of witch hunts, getting rid of ideological competition, gaining both power and money, monopolizing control of people's bodies, calling the shots. (There's a pun in there.)

Since "you" in your original post wasn't addressed to me, I removed it to minimize the recipient confusion, not to remove the context -- besides, it was a tautology, you said it twice and I removed it just once. In any event, no harm intended. With you on this one! I would have loved to go to a school that looks like this! A colleague of mine who went to the same school wound up teaching at the Edinburgh University and I'm not terribly prone to envy but god! that work place of hers! As for me, I graduated from a 13-floor parallelepiped.

Of course there's better sources to learn modern physics! and so on. The pop east meets west books aren't a substitute for a Ph.D. in physics should one pursue it. Rather, they are a useful tool for setting some folks' skewed brains a bit straighter -- folks who've dislocated them by craning their neck to take a conceited view from the top of the ivory tower of "Real Science." And much as I hate sounding woke, for the purposes of this sentence I have to, though I swear I mean something very different from what the true followers of the doctrine mean when they say those words: Eurocentric/Western, and overwhelmingly white male as a default admission ticket for most of its developmental history, is what they really mean when they refer to "Real Science."

Yes, a long time ago. And this one, also ages ago: And this one And a favorite:

I had a horrible physics teacher in school, a horrible chemistry teacher, and a horrible math teacher. Just my luck. They were like that "if you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding" teacher from The Wall. Borderline psychotic, mean, vengeful, corrupt, you name it. So all I did in school for those subjects was the absolute minimum I could get away with, if that. But then for some 2 months we had a substitute math teacher from another school (a specialized math-slanted school where he was one of the teachers known as genius-makers). He started giving us strange math problems of totally unfamiliar design that weren't hinged on whether you had memorized the formulas, and instead required something else, maybe pattern recognition, don't remember what exactly they were about of course. And what a shocker! -- turned out I was a natural for those, and for two months I was treated by the teacher and my surprised classmates as a math star. (We did have a resident math star, with many citywide math competitions victories under his belt, and he was sort of average with those strange different problems. He managed, but not as spectacularly as he usually did with the usual.) It was surprising and exciting. That was the first time in my life when I discovered I may have something mathematical going beneath the surface... sans the mathematical apparatus... but those two months weren't enough for it to emerge, it just peeked out through the hole in The Wall... And then our wall-building regular teacher returned and it was over. What I'm driving at is, there's not enough progress maybe at least in part because educational systems as we know them aren't catching those who could potentially facilitate it, and instead discourage some (many) potential "progressors."

Thanks. Of these I'm only familiar with David Bohm's work. While we're mentioning books that approach physics from some underexplored but potentially fruitful perspective, here's an interesting one I read a bunch of years ago and will probably return to, to see how I see it now: I am fascinated by everything Time and its phenomena (in the "physics" sense -- as are taoist sciences, for which it was the main area of study since time immemorial -- unlike in ours overwhelmingly more focused on the antics of Space phenomena). One quote from Barbour's book that stayed with me as a kind of mental meme, a reminder of sorts of "the way things really are": "The cat that jumped off the couch and the cat that landed on the floor are not the same cat."

Interesting. Sort of dovetails with my assessment -- this late in the state capitalism's day very little is random. Both in economy and in politics. Even when things are falling apart, it's not a random process, it's controlled demolition -- except perhaps for the margin of randomness always present in everything. A narrow one presently and getting narrower by leaps and bounds. Well, that's not their job description. One wall street nerd I knew quite closely for the longest time started out with a rather brilliant "pure" scientist's mind but didn't find any jobs in demand that would reward that with an actual ability to pay the bills. And then this lifestyle meticulously and inevitably extinguishes the drive to do anything other than make money, along with much else. Add to this insider trading and the unholy alliances politicians make with high tech venues toward personal enrichment and we get what we get -- technology we didn't ask for that solves nothing whatsoever on the level of anyone's personal life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

If you are stuck in traffic, make the Kali Mudra, point it at the cars in front of you and proclaim, solemnly, Om Tat Sat! In 9 cases out of 10, the traffic will start dispersing.

Yeah, don't know about the poles -- been hearing talk about them flipping any minute now for the past 20 years so to me it's like flipping a coin... or not flipping it. Who knows. As for daylight saving time, I like what a Native American chief said about it (quoting from memory): brilliant science -- take a blanket, cut a piece of it on one end, sew it onto the other end, and voila -- you now have a longer blanket. People with small children and dogs are particularly 'excited' every time we switch the clocks... and us bazi readers hate it for an additional reason -- every time you do someone's chart you have to go check if DST was in effect that year, that month, that day at that location... ugh. It's different from year to year, country to country... and in the US, a couple of states don't switch and neither do some territories, but there's no guarantee they never did in the past when someone was born, so, still extra work even if it's a Zonie's* chart. *Zonies are people who come on vacation to San Diego from Arizona. A local phenomenon.

Not just wearing them, having the Sun's production line reliably supply them. Circa 1968 the Sun entered a flat maximum reaching into the 1970s, i.e. instead of the erratic flares we all know and hate today, we got a sustained stream of energizing photons consistently nourishing yang creativity on which physics as we know it depends. Contrast it with the biggest flare ever recorded, out of the blue in 2001... That was in April and we all know what happened in September of that year. It's been like that since the 1970s -- the Sun transmitting some Morse code, which no one really bothers to try deciphering.

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

That's speciesism, no? Animals only interesting in what they can do for us, not for their own sake? Yes, some felines, specifically Felis Catus known as domestic cat, have been our companions for quite a while, but most don't want to have anything to do with us if they can help it... I like the shinto view - - no species is thought of as superior to any other, they are all perfect in their own habitat, on their own terms, and people are part of this arrangement, not some special case. Unless we are bent on climbing on top of the Pyramid of Extinction... I shamed myself into thinking I was too judgmental, so I decided to doublecheck and went back to the video. And the first word she uttered was "hello..." -- and my whole life's experience screamed -- "no need to listen to the rest, someone who says hello like this is a bitch." So I stopped right there the second time around. I never had spaghetti from a can so I can't be a reliable judge of it... and my quantum mechanics education is limited to extended lectures on the subject which a family member professionally in the know used to give me during long car trips (they were superb, by the way) for educational entertainment (sic) purposes. But I seem to recall that those loops on the right are sort of wrapped around the non-loopy ones on the left. If you have both varieties, you could conduct a scientific experiment, string the right ones onto the left ones, see what happens. Whether the procedure begets a universe, maybe even a better one if we're lucky, or... well, experimental evidence will tell.

Yes, there's this tough guy (occasionally gal) type who's in it for a chance to hurt someone, but luckily I was spared those encounters with my TKD peers. I loved taekwondo but didn't get far -- had to quit due to family circumstances. My master was the product of the Korean army and handled training his students the way he was taught himself -- mercilessly. But my mood at the time was something like, "let's challenge this lazy cat, i.e. me, who'd rather spend her life on the sofa with a book," so I didn't mind. And later, when the great tao sent my taiji teacher, the first thing he said to me was, without me disclosing it, "ohhh... I can see you did taekwondo... that's OK, I'll get it out of your system." And did, in no time.

This is also what we use in Chen style taiji, the corkscrew motion in the spine with upper and lower parts going in the opposite directions, which is part of what you do to generate a specific kind of power we call peng. I also remember in TKD it was used to teach us to fall on all fours in a hypothetical situation where, e.g., the opponent throws you face down onto an obstacle, a boulder or curb or a glass coffee table: when landing on all fours you twist the upper body sideways to at least save your face. Master Ho had us fall like that onto a pile of soft mats, but it was still scary physics.

And biophysics, and... One of my favorite quotes ever, by an evolutionary biologist Haldane (I think), in response to the question -- --You have studied creation all your life, what have you learned about the Creator? --That God has an inordinate fondness for beetles. Not sure anthropology covers "all" the territory worth covering... in fact, it chiefly concerns itself with the antics of the species Plato called "the featherless biped" (based on the fact that we walk on two legs like birds but unlike birds are, well, featherless). And what about cats? To say nothing of beetles? So... I actually meant taoist sciences which meet the requirement I consider a sine qua non -- a unified theory underlying all of them. But today they are not viewed as science by the popes of the church of modern western science -- and are woefully lumped together, by assorted quacks, with assorted woo-woo... just like quantum mechanics. Unified theory... That physics woman in the video (I may have been too harsh in my assessment, but am too lazy to list all the reasons why) mentioned superstrings (something she apparently doesn't like) in the context of "it was mostly an American thing, not a European one." That's what we have for a unified theory... an American physics and a European physics. Or is it anthropology, sans physics?..

Thanks for clarifying. Looks like in physics "the argument from naturalness" also had (and we can only hope will have again) its champions who hardly meet the criteria for "a clear example of pseudoscience." E.g., Paul Dirac, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist regarded as one of the great ones, expressed this sentiment in a 1960s article titled "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature": "A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data. God is a mathematician of a very high order..." He often reiterated it in his lectures as, ""If a theory is not beautiful, it is probably wrong."

It depends on who those "us" are. Real science, if it existed*, would be based on a unified theory and nothing in the universe would be left out in the cold (however cold) or crash and burn encountering that phenomenon (however hot). I don't just mean a unified theory physicists are pining for (those who care about physics among them, that is, rather than grants and tenures and publications). I mean science as a whole -- where physicists and geologists, biologists and chemists, astronomers and linguists would have an underlying common ground, a common base whence to have a meaningful dialog, a meaningful set of shared fundamentals so they could actually communicate and -- unbelievable as it presently seems -- understand what it's about. Understand it on the level of that unified view, unified theoretical premise they would all share. A science that would have that would be self-consistent across the spectrum of all human endeavors -- not self-contradictory, not weaponized against itself by having skipped that crucial initial step of harmonizing its countless branches by tracing them to a common root. Funny thing is, technology would never be as all-powerful if this kind of science existed. There would be deterrents built in... *It does. It just takes a much longer, much more dedicated study, is not part of any current institution's curriculum, and has empirical outcomes not readily caught by currently accepted/available methods and models. Its time will either come or we're toast. I miss him too.

The first thing she offered as "a clear example of pseudoscience" is "arguments from naturalness."

Dogs will eat anything. Your 'Home Science" sounds like a very useful subject (unless botched by useless teachers.) We had something similar, gender segregated -- boys were doing something in the mechanical shop and girls were knitting and sewing. I had neither the talent nor the patience for either, so my knitted goods self-limited to a scarf just big enough for a cat (should a cat agree to wear a scarf), and I also sewed a pretty nightgown that would probably fit someone very asymmetrical, with one arm three times the circumference of the other and one leg about a foot longer.

WD-40* *How to fix anything... life's most profound lesson: If it moves but shouldn't -- duct tape If it doesn't move but should -- WD-40

That's exactly what I thought too.

I am very fond of my frying pans. They are decades old (the oldest one is 70) and take heavy use in stride. In addition to cast iron I have copper and copper-over-steel ones. It's true that my 12-inch copper beauty* lost all the tin, but to re-tin it costs hundreds of dollars in our parts, so I just don't use it for anything acidic it might react with. I could give a reason and rationale for the fact that I have 7 frying pans and none are decorative or the outcome of hoarding. I use all of them interchangeably -- each of them knows what its purpose in life is and does not infringe upon another frying pan's territory. But If I was limited to just one (as I used to be), that one would be cast iron. *beauty: I mean its performance, not appearance, since it shines from thorough polishing maybe once a year and then it's all downhill for it. Scrubbing and polishing to a beautiful uniform shine is for decorative copper, not for the workhorse of the kitchen.)

We too have inherited the skill of the skillet from our primate ancestors. An FBI report from 2013 found that more crimes are committed with blunt everyday objects than with firearms -- and frying pans are quite popular. I have two cast iron frying pans in regular use and always handy. The bigger one weighs 7 lb. (For comparison -- a baseball bat is about 2 lb.) Reptilian and other malevolent creatures may want to step carefully.

When my cat was only a few weeks old, for some reason she was very interested in vegetables. Every time I come across that ubiquitous meme where a cat is being yelled at for not eating her broccoli, I find it heartbreaking. (Yes, I know it's not the cat in the original photo. Still, I can't help thinking my poor kitty may have been starving in her early kittenhood and would eat whatever... I got her when she was way too small for adoption age -- the woman selling her in the parking lot didn't seem like a reliable cat person, so, who knows. Incidentally, yesterday she brought home her first wild mouse... I mean the cat did, not that woman.)